| Study: PR Pros are Unjustly Perceived as Liars—Scoring Higher in Ethics than Surgeons and Accountants |
| Spin doctors. Flacks. B.S. artists. The list of derogatory slang terms for public relations professionals goes on and on. And the perception among the public—and especially journalists—is only getting worse, with highly publicized criticism in the last few years from Wired's Chris Anderson and The New York Times's Joe Nocera. But new research shows that this criticism is off target: "It turns out that public relations professionals are good ethical thinkers," says Renita Coleman, a Legacy Scholar at Coleman, along with another Page Center Johnson Legacy Scholar, Lee Wilkins, is the author of a new paper called "The Moral Development of Public Relations Practitioners: A Comparison with Other Professions and Influences on Higher Quality Ethical Reasoning." The study appeared in the July 2009 Journal of Public Relations Research. PR people, Coleman says, "show similarity to other professionals with comparable levels of education such as journalists, nurses and dental students." In fact, PR pros scored better than orthopedic surgeons, business professionals, accounting students and veterinary students. This research is the first to measure empirically the moral development of working public relations professionals. Coleman, assistant professor of journalism at the The test poses six ethical dilemmas and asks respondents to rank 12 statements after each dilemma according to how important each was in making a decision. The measure was a five-point scale where one equaled "no importance" and five equaled "great importance." The Defining Issues Test (DIT) measures ethical reasoning in five areas: business concerns, internal motives, truth and respect, religious influences and external influences. Test scores of the public relations professionals were compared to the scores of 19 other groups whose members had taken the DIT test in the past. Seminarians and philosophers are the runaway winners on the moral development scale as measured by the test. After that come medical students, practicing physicians, journalists, dental students, nurses and public relations pros. Last on the moral development scale? Junior high school students, one notch below prison inmates. "But that's not surprising, because age and education are the best predictors of moral development—the more you have, the better you do," says Coleman. "And it shows why middle-schoolers still need their parents' guidance." Despite popular conceptions, Coleman and Wilkins say that ethics are particularly important for PR practitioners: "Public relations professionals see their role as connecting clients to the larger world, primarily though journalists or to the news media. To accomplish this function, they need to maintain the trust of both parties, but particularly the trust of journalists who are already skeptical of their institutional role and their individual motives. Consequently, honesty and a lack of willingness to deceive those who receive information are critical in effective public relations practice." |
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| Jai Xavier Prabhu David, Director & CEO |
| | PRHUB Integrated Marketing Communication Pvt. Ltd, | |
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